Oona King: housing and being Not Ken

Oona King was fortunate that The Guardian showed up this morning to hear her launch the housing policies she would pursue as London Mayor. I say this not simply because The Guardian's presence was as charming and attentive as you would expect, but also because it's was the only media presence. Oona's team had hoped that others would fill the rows of chairs in a small upstairs room in Great Smith Street, Westminster but none of them showed. This could be Oona's biggest problem in her contest with Ken Livingstone to become Labour's next candidate to be London Mayor: Ken draws a crowd; his rival doesn't, at least not yet.

That was a pity in this case because Candidate King, accompanied by Joan Ruddock MP, was for the first time setting out some policy detail. Housing is a specialism of hers and for many Londoners a massive problem that looks set to become bigger. She described meeting housing need as "the most fundamental public service," one that can help prevent the knock-on social ill-effects of general poor living conditions and over-crowding.

One of her first acts as Mayor, she said, would be to set up a commission under Nick Raynsford MP and ask it for recommendations that would provide value for money, improve the lot of children, enhance social cohesion, help more people on to the property ladder and tackle that peculiarly ludicrous London poverty trap that punishes people who take up low-paid jobs by docking so much of their housing benefit as a result that they end up financially worse off.

That all sounded perfectly fine and please note those family-and-taxpayer friendly touches. Critics of Ken depict him as confrontational and profligate. Presenting herself persuasively as womanly, thrifty and generally Not Ken seems vital to Oona's hopes. That said, she says she admires much that Ken achieved and if she won City Hall she'd revive a core Ken housing plank that Boris Johnson has removed. The so-called "50 percent rule" was a sort of mayoral threat to London's boroughs that if less than half the homes in any new development met the "affordable" definition then Ken would use his powers to block it. My impression is that a number of boroughs of all political shades are glad to see the 50 percent rule gone, arguing that it deterred housing providers from building anything at all.

Oona, though, favours it "because it concentrates their minds" in a way that "warm words" don't. She added, however, that working "more co-operatively," is a good principle to follow in all policy contexts. "Ken's experience of trying to get Oyster cards to the suburbs is a case in point," she digressed without a prompt. "He got into vociferous arguments with the train companies. Boris Johnson took them out to lunch and sorted it out. There are different approaches to these policy issues, and I am very much of the opinion that you need to work collaboratively." How's that for Not Ken?

She said she sympathised with borough leaders who seek more flexibility in housing - Boris's freshly-launched Delegated Delivery Programme Pilot will make some interesting further reading for her - and pledged to "work collaboratively" and "imaginatively" with borough leaders who'd shown real commitment to increasing affordable supply. She also proposed an extension of localised existing schemes that allow hard-up pensioners to use a little of the equity in homes they own to fund upkeep work they cannot otherwise afford, and to extend opportunities for people on (in the London housing context) middle-to-low incomes to get a foot on the housing ladder. Her emphasis, she said, would be on the £30,000 to £40,000 bracket. "At the moment," she pointed out, "You can only get housing in London if you are very, very rich or very, very poor."

And with that our small party headed across a peace-encamped Parliament Square for a photo call with most of the eleven London Labour MPs who've publicly backed Oona so far. These include Margaret Hodge, Andy Love, new girl Stella Creasy and Kate Hoey, who works for Boris as his sports commissioner and is emphatically not a pal of Ken. Team Oona is making great play of these Commons backers, even though London MPs have only one vote in the constituency half of the electoral college that will select the candidate, the same as every other London party member. Mind you, Ken has the backing of six including the influential Jon Cruddas, plus Ed Balls (who told the Politics Show in London so last week: I was listening), union leaders Paul Kenny and Steve Hart, a bunch of London councillors and more.

Oona, you sense, has a lot of work to do if she's to convince the London Labour "selectorate" that she has, in Ruddock's words, "the appeal, the ability and the policies to beat Boris," in greater quantities than Ken. But this morning's work won't have done her any harm.